Featured Topics: Autumn 2025 Fiction

Asa is the long-awaited new thriller by bestselling author Zoran Drvenkar. A brutal family epic spanning more than a hundred years with stops in Norway, Venice, Cape Verde, and rural...

Death brings everyone together: while their deceased mother is lying upstairs in the bedroom, in the kitchen, two brothers see each other for the first time in a long time. Anton, the older of the two, has headed off in search of greener pastures. Tolik, the younger brother, has stayed behind, despite the smouldering war and the increasingly precarious conditions. But now the bridge has been...

An actor is in her early sixties when she suddenly starts losing her hair in tufts. Without putting up a fight, the hair starts to depart her body, the strands lying limp in her hands like dead snakes. Decay has set in, time is the killer. Or is she sick? In any case, she cannot play her stage roles like this anymore, especially not that of Medusa or the Queen Mother. She is pushed out of the...

Born in Germany to a Ukrainian single mother and raised in a household where money was scarce and love was measured in calories, grades, and the numbers on a scale, the protagonist carries these inherited patterns of control and deprivation into adulthood.

Now a writer who hasn’t written a single line in months, she leads a precarious existence in Berlin. She moves from sublet to...

Shortlisted for the ZDF »aspekte« Literary Prize 2025

»This novel will break your heart – and yet, it makes you want to love like Zeko does, just once in your life.«...

Feeling exhausted, hurt, unstable, seeking help – these are some of the existential feelings and emotional struggles that Sirka Elspaß addresses in her new collection of poems. From everyday observations, such as “how often don’t worry about it / appears in the thread”, to the guardian angel who throws in the towel and is no longer reachable, “has even turned off his voicemail.” The gaze falls on...

We’re sitting in the dark. On the screen, Great Garbo and Erika Mann meet up in 1969 in the Swiss alps and reminisce. What was the deal with Marlene Dietrich and the woman they both had a thing with? When film captured the zeitgeist of a whole era and the Germans had Hollywood and all of America eating out of their hands. And what about Erika Mann’s antifascist cabaret Die Pfeffermühle, which had...

In the autumn of 1989, Luzy Morgenroth is living as a country police officer on the remote island of Amrum. Nobody around her senses that long ago, she was somebody else. When a local man vanishes...

Murder ballads have been around since people have been telling stories. Whether it’s H.C. Artmann’s dialect poems, Bertolt Brecht’s The Ballad of Mack the Knife or Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, they all revolve around crime. Juliane Liebert brings this genre into the present day and writes about a female bank robber in men’s clothes who is killed in a stand-off with the police....

When Oskar Fiala, a forgotten, unknown left-wing social-democrat author, died penniless and nameless on the outskirts of Leipzig in 1948, his death certificate listed his occupation as »worker, mining«. The young journalist and writer led a restless and aimless life, wandering peripatetically across Europe, until the Second World War put an end to his movement. Time and again, he suffered...

A young poet, who presented her work to the Gruppe 47 for the first time in 1952, and a man nine years her senior, already an established writer. In their letters, Ingeborg Bachmann and Heinrich Böll talk about politics and literature, religion and travel, and time ang again, about the material prerequisites of writing: money and a roof over their heads. Over many years, they read each other’s...

What do we find when we dig in the sands of history? What doe history produce for the present and the immediate future? Alexander Kluge reveals unforeseen connections by gathering together texts and vast numbers of images, for which he partially uses artificial intelligence as a kind of »virtual camera«. His image atlas enable him to firstly keep history alive, and secondly to articulate an...

A little village in Bavaria in the late 1950s: a child is born through a connection nobody here had even considered possible. The mother is from Silesia, one of the Heimatvertriebene, ethnic Germans who were expelled from the east after the war and had settled in the town a decade ago. The father is a medical student from Syria, who comes to the village to learn German at the Goethe...

In his successful collection of memoires and reflections, Rendezvous with Poets, Michael Krüger only got to scratch the surface of his repository of experiences and anecdotes. As a publisher and editor, but also as a poet and translator, he had the privilege of introducing, promoting, and mourning many more authors.

In his new volume, Among Poets, he again...